Substance Abuse

Research Activities and Funding Opportunities

Spotlight

The NIH Guide for Grants and Contracts is the official publication for NIH medical and behavioral research grant policies, guidelines and funding opportunities. Researchers can use this site to search for funding opportunities or sign up for weekly email updates on NIH-supported grants and contracts.

National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA)

The DESPR promotes epidemiology, services, and prevention research to understand and address the range of problems related to drug abuse to improve public health. It is divided into three branches: the Prevention Research Branch, the Epidemiology Research Branch, and the Services Research Branch. The mission of the Prevention Research Branch is to improve the Nation’s public health status through supporting a program of basic, clinical, and services research on the development, testing, and translation of prevention interventions targeting the initiation of drug use, the progression to abuse and dependence, and the transmission of HIV infection among diverse populations and settings.

Extramural Research Centers Supported by the NIH

National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA)

The NIAAA has established a nationwide program of Alcohol Research Centers. The program complements and is interrelated with all other research support mechanisms and scientific activities that investigate the causes, diagnosis, treatment, control, prevention, and consequences of alcohol abuse and alcoholism. The Alcohol Research Centers provide long-term support (typically 5 years) for interdisciplinary research that focuses on particular aspects of alcohol abuse, alcoholism, or other related problems. This program encourages outstanding scientists from many disciplines to provide a full range of expertise, approaches, and advanced technologies for developing knowledge in these areas. A primary goal of each NIAAA-funded Center is to become, through excellence in scientific research, a significant regional or national research resource. In addition, each Center affords research training opportunities for individuals from various disciplines and professions. For more information on training programs, please see the Training Opportunities and Continuing Medical Education section.

Transdisciplinary Research and Methodology Infrastructure for Prevention

National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA)

The NIDA helps to foster the next generation of research through its Core Centers of Excellence (CCE) grant program. The CCE grant program is designed to integrate and transform ongoing drug abuse and addiction research leading to the creation of new research directions (P30), and to support innovative, multidisciplinary research infrastructure that is integrated and synergistic, and that can serve as a national resource for drug abuse research (P50). There are five Centers focused on transdisciplinary research and methodology.

Center for Drug Abuse Research Translation (P50)
This Center includes three integrated research projects on the biologically based facets of personality and their relationship to risk for drug abuse. Using neurochemical and electrophysiological techniques in rats, as well as neuroimaging techniques in humans, this Center studies the basic neural mechanisms that mediate these different risk-related facets. The goal is to translate these findings into prevention applications that target these multiple risk-related facets in small-scale efficacy and pilot prevention trials.

Center for Prevention and Treatment Methodology (P50)
The overarching goal of this Center is to improve quantitative methods for prevention and treatment research on substance use, HIV, and related disorders. The Center has been developing new research designs for clinical trials that help optimize interventions and better approximate normal clinical practice, as well as developing new analytic approaches and tools to maximize the use of longitudinal data.

Transdisciplinary Center Focused on Rural African American Families (P30)
This Center seeks to use findings from gene-environment interplay as well as developmental and epigenetic research conducted with rural African Americans. This Center seeks to transform etiologic models of drug abuse and sexual risk behavior to increase their predictive utility and the efficacy of the prevention programs they inform.

Center for Drug Abuse Prevention in the Child Welfare System (P30)
This Center supports an infrastructure for the systematic integration and extension of basic and implementation research targeted to Child Welfare System (CWS) science, practice, and policy. Research at this Center includes both the development of interventions for CWS children and families, and their implementation into routine CWS practice.

Other Research Activities and Funding Opportunities

National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA)
National Institute on Alcoholism and Alcohol Abuse (NIAAA)
National Cancer Institute (NCI)

The NIDA, the NIAAA, and the NCI released two Funding Opportunity Announcements (FOAs) to promote the goals of CRAN, formerly known as “functional integration” of addiction research at the NIH. Its mission is to provide a strong collaborative framework for enabling the NIDA, the NIAAA, and the NCI to pool resources and expertise, creating synergies in addiction science, addressing new research opportunities, and meeting the public’s health needs. The current FOAs are for administrative supplements and competitive revision applications to promote research on new and/or under-recognized opportunities addressing polysubstance use and co-morbidity. Many existing research projects focus on only one substance (e.g., alcohol, tobacco, cocaine, heroin), yet epidemiological and clinical research indicates that polysubstance use is common, as are co-morbid substance use disorders. Basic research on behavioral and neural mechanisms reveals overlapping substrates and consequences of exposure to diverse substances. Despite this knowledge, many investigator-initiated projects do not take full advantage of opportunities to address scientific issues related to polysubstance use and co-morbidity. Learn more about the FOAs here: RFA-DA-14-014 and PA-13-275.

National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA)

Prevention research at NIDA includes SBIP research that focuses on screening and identifying people who are at risk for drug use and drug-related risk behaviors and providing a brief intervention to prevent and/or reduce risk behaviors. NIDA-funded research studies include diverse populations and settings, and varied delivery formats, including in-person and technology-based approaches. Examples of funded SBIP studies include:

National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA)

The FASD program sponsors projects on prevention, treatment of women with alcohol use disorders, improving diagnosis of FASD, increasing understanding of the effects of alcohol on the unborn child, and developing effective interventions to mitigate the health effects on those prenatally exposed to alcohol.

Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD)

Factors that affect pregnancy and fetal development are central to the NICHD’s research. The Institute supports and conducts research to understand the ways in which exposure to alcohol and drugs may affect pregnancy, a developing fetus, and development throughout the lifespan. Some of this research is done in partnership with other NIH Institutes whose sole focus is on alcohol and drugs, such as the NIAAA and the NIDA, while other efforts are handled solely by NICHD organizational units. Within this context, current NICHD research includes:

Effects of alcohol consumption on fetal development and infant health

Effects of exposure to different classes of drugs on fetal development and on later development.

Mechanisms by which alcohol causes birth defects.

Effects of alcohol on maternal health, including placental effects.

Patterns of alcohol consumption and drug use during pregnancy.

Effects of maternal alcohol consumption on stillbirth and sudden infant death syndrome.

National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA)

The APIS provides detailed information on a wide variety of alcohol-related policies in the United States at both state and federal levels. Detailed, state-by-state information is available for the 33 policies listed on the APIS website. The APIS also provides a variety of informational resources of interest to alcohol policy researchers and others involved with alcohol policy issues.

National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH)

The NIMH Office for Research on Disparities and Global Mental Health and Division of Services and Intervention Research convened this meeting to assess the state of the science in preventing and treating medical co-morbidities in people with severe mental illness (SMI) and identify the most critically needed research to reduce premature mortality in this vulnerable group. The 11.4 million people in the United States with SMI carry a heavy disease burden, in addition to having a mental illness. They die 11–32 years prematurely from largely preventable co-morbid medical conditions—e.g., heart disease, diabetes, cancer, pulmonary disease, and stroke—which occur more frequently and have earlier onset in this population. Low rates of prevention, detection, and treatment further add to these health disparities. While effective approaches to these common conditions and their health risk factors exist for the general population, evidence is needed on how to bring these effective strategies to people with SMI. During the meeting, NIH-funded researchers presented key findings on health interventions shown to be effective in the general population for drug abuse, for prevention of cardiovascular disease and diabetes, and for tobacco cessation, as well as how these interventions could be adapted to meet the needs of people with SMI.

Training Opportunities and Continuing Medical Education

National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA)

This NIAAA-funded postdoctoral training program is hosted at the Prevention Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley. An emphasis is placed on developing a greater understanding of the (1) spectrum of prevention strategies and the science base underlying them; (2) methodologies relevant to the study of prevention strategies; and (3) techniques associated with the evaluation of prevention programs. For more information, please visit the University of California, Berkeley Prevention Science Research Program website.

Prevention Research Training Programs at NIDA

National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA)

The NIDA supports two prevention research training programs, at Yale University and the Pennsylvania State University. The Yale University postdoctoral prevention research training program focuses on an ecological framework for substance use/abuse and related behaviors that emphasizes developmental, neurobiological, environmental, and cultural contexts. The Pennsylvania State University program trains pre- and postdoctoral fellows toward producing prevention scientists who apply the most appropriate and cutting-edge methodology to research on improving and disseminating prevention interventions.

National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA)

The NIDA U.S.–Mexico Drug Abuse Prevention Research Fellowship provides a unique opportunity for Mexican researchers to obtain postdoctoral training with a NIDA-supported U.S. mentor. Prevention Research Fellows benefit from an intensive 1-year research training experience designed to enhance the fellows’ ability to conduct independent research upon return to Mexico. Applicants and their U.S. mentor may propose to conduct their research in any area of drug abuse prevention research, such as prevention intervention research, prevention services research, prevention methodology, or drug abuse prevention as HIV/AIDS prevention. For more details and information on how to apply, please see the U.S.–Mexico Drug Abuse Prevention Research Fellowship website.